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<span class="date-display-single">August 28, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>submit to reddit. <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, Senior Editor of The New Republic, says Vice President Joe Biden has been working towards running for President of the United States in 2016 for years, despite the fact that he would be 74-years-old when he is inaugurated.</p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
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</ul>New America Fellows ProgramTue, 28 Aug 2012 11:23:00 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>70771 at http://newamerica.net Joementum http://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/joementum_70745
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<span class="date-display-single">August 24, 2012</span></div>
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Biden prepares for 2016. </div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">August 24, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>TYPICALLY AT this point on the political calendar, a sitting vice president scrupulously downplays his interest in ascending to the top job. The thought of course consumes him, but actually discussing it strikes him as breathtakingly gauche. Vice presidents as varied as Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore all gamely hewed to this script.<br /><br />And then there is Joe Biden. Given his age (he would be 74 on Inauguration Day 2017), his Rodney Dangerfield reputation among Democrats, and the icon status of presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton, few political observers seem confident he’ll even contest the next race. Except, that is, for Biden himself, who has been anything but bashful about his intentions for 2016. When asked by CNN late last year if he was “closing that door” on another attempt at the White House, a slightly offended Biden insisted he was “not closing anything.” He elaborated: “I wouldn’t have run for president in the first place—and I don’t think the president would have picked me—unless he thought I’d be good at the job.”<br /><br />This wasn’t a case of Biden winging it on national television, as is his wont. His brain trust, too, has been gaming out a final run at the highest office. In a not-for-attribution conversation, one longtime Biden adviser who doesn’t currently work for the vice president, but would play a key role in a 2016 campaign, sketched out a surprisingly detailed strategy.<br /><br />First, Biden is going to extravagant lengths to ensure his boss’s reelection while putting his own ambitions on hold, in the hope that the Obama brass will reward this selflessness when the time comes. There is, quite simply, no speech Biden won’t deliver if it advances the White House cause, no attack on Mitt Romney he won’t wage, no annual convention of Pacific Islander flight attendants he won’t attend on the president’s behalf. “To some extent, he’s put himself in a challenging position [for 2016] by playing by the rules of the Obama political operation and not doing a lot of the prep work, particularly around fund-raising, you would ordinarily be doing by now,” says the adviser.<br /><br />But Biden’s inner circle believes the strategy will position him to inherit key players on President Obama’s political team. The adviser notes, for example, that Jim Messina, the president’s 2012 campaign manager, is a huge Biden fan who could play a leading role in a future campaign: “Jim and the vice president have built up a nice relationship these past four years.” Likewise, Rufus Gifford, the Obama campaign’s chief fund-raiser, could give Biden entrée to deep-pocketed donors (who have eluded him thus far) in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the financial sector. “I know [Gifford] felt the vice president has done a great job. He could be instrumental in pulling together money for this,” the adviser explains.<br /><br />Step two of the master plan is leveraging Biden’s deep ties to traditional Democratic constituencies, such as labor, trial lawyers, and African American, Jewish, and gay groups and donors, the last of which were thrilled by his plug for same-sex marriage this May. The vice president cultivated some of these ties for decades as a senator, but has strengthened them significantly during his punishing tour of Holiday Inn ballrooms over the past four years. “Biden has a special call on a lot of people’s loyalties, starting with the president,” says the adviser. “That’s why you’ve got to take him seriously. And he’s serious.”<br /><br />All of which makes it unsurprising that Biden considers himself, if not the 800-pound gorilla of the 2016 field, then certainly a big-boned primate. “Other than Hillary, he doesn’t consider any of the names lurking beneath the surface as competitors,” says the adviser. But even if we allow that Biden’s chances are far better in 2016 than they were in 2008, does that make them, you know, good?<br /><br /> <br /><br />“I’VE GOT A BETTER SHOT at being president than him,” groused one Obama fund-raiser when I first floated the idea. Then something curious happened. The longer we spoke, the more this person convinced himself that Biden did have a real shot, at least without Clinton in the race. “This guy has done everything the president asked him to do,” said the fund-raiser. “Even if he wasn’t going to win ... I’m writing him checks, raising money as a thank you.” The source estimated that, when this “thank-you money” was combined with what should be solid early poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden would be a bona fide contender.<br /><br />Of course, the Clinton network will also have much to say about the next Democratic nominee—and here, too, Biden’s prospects are surprisingly promising if Hillary takes a pass. Last winter, Biden hired a counselor named Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, partly to help nail down Hillary’s political handlers, according to the Biden adviser. One such target is Nick Clemons, the man who captained Clinton’s dramatic comeback in the 2008 New Hampshire primary. “Nick is probably the number one grab choice in 2016,” the adviser predicts. “I would think Nick would be with us.” A top Clinton aide from 2008 found this to be entirely plausible: “I think there’s a chance for [Biden] to sort of get a large number of the operatives.”<br /><br />It’s enough to make you start dropping Biden’s name into aimless August political conversations. (Trust me, I’ve done it.) That is, until you talk to some more seasoned Obama alumni and the grand vision all comes crashing down. At this point, you realize the problem isn’t that Biden can’t mount a credible campaign. The problem is that, even after his highly successful, expectations-beating vice presidency, too many Democrats still regard him as distinctly un-presidential.<br /><br />One Obama operative from 2008 turned slightly frigid when asked if Biden had a chance to inherit the president’s Iowa apparatus: “I don’t think so. Obama’s world is so unique, and it’s uniquely Obama. I don’t think it necessarily translates to anyone.”<br /><br />Another Obama veteran argues that Democratic primaries these days are more about inspiring the base than cashing in chits. Of all the potential 2016 contenders—Clinton, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—the second operative says Biden is worst positioned to do that: “Biden’s story is thirty years past due. He was a young hotshot in 1988.” It’s not that rank-and-file Democrats don’t love Biden—they do. But they love the image of him soaping up his Trans Am in the White House driveway, clad in nothing but jean shorts—as The Onion famously spoofed him—not the image of him manning the Oval Office controls.<br /><br />The people on top of Obama Inc. share this affection, but have their own Biden hang-ups. “They think he talks too much,” says a senior administration official. “He’s a nice guy, but I don’t think they think he’s the [future] president.” While there was no truth behind the recent chatter that Obama would relegate him to the State Department and enlist Clinton as his running mate—Biden’s status on the 2012 ticket has always been secure—it’s not hard to imagine Chicago pining for a more on-message veep.<br /><br />Biden is, after all, the man who once waxed optimistic about then-Senator Obama’s future by testifying to his hygiene (“articulate and bright and clean,” in his trademark locution). He is the off-the-cuff geostrategist who, within three weeks of the 2008 election, predicted that America’s enemies would test Obama during his first six months as president. Earlier this month, Biden stood before a mixed-race crowd in Virginia and accused Romney of wanting to “unchain Wall Street” and put “you all back in chains,” marking what must be the first time in a century that one major campaign has accused the other of pro-slavery sympathies.<br /><br />Still, perhaps the real problem with Biden’s college-roommate-at-a-weddingreception sense of tact isn’t the damage it inflicts on Obama, which is minimal. It’s the damage it inflicts on Biden himself. According to Team Biden’s own plan, one of the few tasks he had to complete this year was to appear entirely focused on the president’s reelection. And yet his gay-marriage indiscretion this spring had all the trappings of presidential maneuvering and had White House aides fuming. Call it the paradox of Joe Biden: The vice president has always been compelling enough to send Democratic strategists daydreaming. But, no matter how good the strategy, Biden always finds a way to step on Biden in the end.</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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http://newamerica.net/node/70745 </div>
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New America Fellows ProgramElections & Political PartiesThe New RepublicMon, 27 Aug 2012 16:17:31 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>70745 at http://newamerica.netThe Square and the Flair http://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/the_square_and_the_flair_70240
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<span class="date-display-single">August 6, 2012</span></div>
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Well, of course Mitt Romney’s top strategist is a steroid-dabbling, screenwriting bon vivant. </div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">August 6, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>BEFORE HE EARNED his reputation as one of the best ad men in politics, before he wrote for several major television shows, and long before he became Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens found himself in Cameroon, face to face with a machine-gun-wielding soldier looking to shake him down. It was 1988, and a few weeks earlier, Stevens had deposited himself in the nearby Central African Republic to pick up a friend’s Land Rover and drive it back to France. But the trip was a disaster from the get-go. Local officials confiscated the car and refused to release it. Weeks passed before he could find a roadworthy replacement. By the time Stevens finally got moving, he discovered that his maps were unreliable, the roads nearly impassable, and the local bureaucrats inhospitable. Distances drivable within a few hours in the United States gobbled up days.<br /><br />And then Stevens arrived at a military roadblock in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital. “When [the soldier] jerked the bag from my hands and spat, ‘Open!,’ tottering back on his heels, I realized he was drunk,” Stevens wrote in his book Malaria Dreams. Stevens surveyed the soldier’s comrades; they were all drunk. Soon the two men were locked in a tense back-and-forth, with the soldier lifting each possession from his briefcase, and Stevens shaking his head no. Eventually, the soldier settled on a tape recorder. “You give to me!” he shouted, snatching the device. Stevens stopped his hand. “Twelve hours ago I would have parted with a small item, say the three-dollar penlight,” he explained, “but now I was steeled to see it through.” They stared at each other; the other soldiers stiffened. Finally, Stevens’s African driver had the sense to slip the looter a bribe, and the showdown ended. The soldiers waved the car through.<br /><br />“I found myself enjoying the moment,” he wrote of the snag. “Everyone had said I was crazy to go to Africa, that there were dangerous sorts of people and situations worth avoiding. Now, at least, I’d found a bit of both.”<br /><br />The story has all the elements of a classic Stevens tale: exotic scenery, surly natives, a faint whiff of violence, and, of course, a slightly preposterous hero. As an adolescent in an affluent, liberal enclave of Jackson, Mississippi, Stevens idolized British travel writers like Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming (brother of Ian) because their stories offered a temporary escape from the provincialism of the Deep South. These authors would implant themselves in the harshest locales on the planet with little knowledge of the terrain or culture, even less in the way of equipment, and no particular expertise in survival. (Graham Greene’s contribution to the genre is titled Journey Without Maps.) And yet somehow they would always find their way back to civilization with a wry expression and a charming narrative to convey.<br /><br />It is impossible to miss the influence of these writer-adventurers on Stevens, who has published three books about his journeys across Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 1984, he decided to complete all ten races on the Worldloppet circuit, a series of cross-country ski marathons, in a single eight-week stretch. Twice, he finished a race on a Saturday afternoon and had to catch an overnight, transatlantic flight to compete in another one Sunday morning. In preparation for the legendary Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, a 1,200-kilometer odyssey, he once put himself on an elaborate steroid regimen and documented the experience for Outside magazine. In 1997, he published Feeding Frenzy, a chronicle of his month in Europe dining at each of the 29 restaurants with claims to three Michelin stars. “It seemed like a ridiculous notion,” Stevens told Charlie Rose. “I think by doing things to excess, you kind of, like, can crack them open and have fun.”<br /><br />Stevens approaches politics the same way: as an all-consuming, quasi-physical challenge that he can play for laughs when the election’s over. Though his sensibilities suggest a faint Toryism––in his travel books, he periodically bemoans the influence of modern civilization and its corollary, the bureaucratic state––he is far too idiosyncratic a character to embrace an ideology or align with a movement. “Stuart prides himself on being not captive to any particular interest,” says Rachel Klayman, his editor, who recalls Stevens telling her he planned to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. (“Rachel’s a great editor and is passionate in supporting the president. But I have never voted for a Democrat and didn’t vote for Obama,” says Stevens, who otherwise declined to comment for this piece.) If the reigning fashion is to view elections as life-or-death struggles, Stevens, who doesn’t even regard matters of life and death as life-or-death struggles, sees them as an exhilarating form of sport.<br /><br />Which makes it all the more peculiar that Stevens has been directing strategy for Mitt Romney, perhaps the most cautious homebody of a candidate in recent memory––a candidate who has never tempted a Cameroonian firing squad, but who, as head of Bain Capital, was known for flapping his tie to signal his accelerating heartbeat over underperforming deals. It’s a shock that the two men can hold a conversation, much less partner on a presidential campaign. But the truth is that, deep down, Stevens and Romney aren’t so different after all. And therein lies the problem.<br /><br /> <br /><br />MOST POLITICAL CONSULTANTS refer to Washington as if it were some far-off province they could barely find on a map, even as they secretly delight in their Beltway existence. That’s not the case with Stevens. Although his firm, The Stevens &amp; Schriefer Group, is located in the capital, he has always steered clear of the city, preferring to commute irregularly from New York and Vermont. “I used to joke in the D.C. office that you had people who worked at the company who had never even met Stuart,” says Ashley O’Connor, a longtime collaborator and fellow Romney aide.<br /><br />It’s the company-town drabness that Stevens finds oppressive. “In most cities, it’s mandatory to be sexy,” he once told The Baltimore Sun. “In Washington ... [i]t’s considered a breach of conduct to be sexy. Just go down to 19th and K ... the women are all walking around in Reeboks.”<br /><br />Stevens is, by nature, a dilettante, a man who breaks out in cold sweats at the thought of specializing. This may explain why he attended four universities--and why, even though he loves the adrenalin-rush of politics, he prefers it in small doses, freeing up time to train, travel, and write. At times, he cultivates these interests simultaneously. “I remember in the middle of a campaign, he sat on conference calls while hiking with some Arctic explorer,” says one former Stevens &amp; Schriefer employee. “Or he’ll be downhill skiing on a conference call on his Bluetooth and you’ll hear the snow whisp.”<br /><br />Stevens rarely even commits to one version of a hobby. Explaining his interest in triathlons, he once wrote, “Why be good at one sport when you can be unimpressive at three?” In addition to his travel books and magazine writing, he has written a novel about two brothers on opposite sides of a Senate race and worked as a screenwriter on shows like “Northern Exposure” and “I’ll Fly Away.”<br /><br />Stevens’s political career began as a bit of a lark. In the mid-’70s, he interned in the congressional office of Thad Cochran and became friendly with Cochran’s chief of staff, Jon Hinson. When Hinson later ran for Congress, he enlisted Stevens to make his ads. Other than the internship, Stevens had little political experience to speak of. But his years of wandering included a stint in film school, and Hinson figured he knew his way around a camera.<br /><br />The whole campaign had an amateurish “Hey, let’s put on a play” quality. Hinson was an enormous underdog, having drawn as his opponent John H. Stennis, the son of the legendary Mississippi senator. To fill out the staff, Stevens enlisted some of his high school classmates, persuading one who had worked at a local TV station to sign on as press secretary. But Stevens’s amateurishness proved to be an asset. He rejected the norms of political ad-making––or, rather, was unaware of them––and affected a winning quirkiness. Hinson’s introductory spot began, as one campaign aide recalls it, “Hi, you don’t know me, but your last three congressmen did,” before touting the benefits of his Capitol Hill experience. Hinson pulled off the upset.<br /><br />Even as he ascended the top ranks of consultants, this unrefined vibe was the key to Stevens’s success. Unlike most political veterans, he didn’t bog himself down in ideology or lingo. His clients came off more like network TV characters than C-SPAN stiffs. In the mid-’90s, he reprised the feel of the Hinson ad on behalf of a Pennsylvania candidate named Tom Ridge. “[W]hen I announced for governor, a Philadelphia newspaper called me ‘A guy nobody’s ever heard of, from a city nobody’s ever seen,’” Ridge said to the camera. “[B]ut that’s OK. I’m used to it. I grew up in public housing till my mom and dad could move here.” At which point, Ridge’s mom pokes her head out of a doorway and says, “Tom, put your hat on.”<br /><br />Above all, Stevens’s dabbler sensibility gave him an enviable range of skills. He was not so much an ad man as a creative consultant with a filmmaker’s eye and a screenwriter’s sense of pace. Stevens is, for example, quick to adopt film techniques––like the Steadicam, a tool he imported from TV sports coverage to shoot subjects in motion. Not surprisingly, he excels at the more cinematic projects that candidates undertake. Working on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1995, Stevens put together a 14-minute biographical video replete with a Ken Burns-like voice-over and a reenactment of Dole’s war wounds.<br /><br />Throughout the ’90s, Stevens’s fellow consultants bristled at his snobbery and knocked his lack of heft. But it was hard to argue with his results. In 1994, the year that cemented his reputation, he compiled an impressive 12-0 record, including several victories in Democratic-leaning states.<br /><br />A few years later, Stevens’s longtime friend and collaborator Karl Rove introduced him to an up-and-coming governor named George W. Bush. The two men hit it off, and Stevens and his wife eventually moved to Austin so he could work on Bush’s presidential campaign. This naturally inspired another book, The Big Enchilada, which is perhaps the first-ever travelogue situated at the highest levels of presidential politics.<br /><br />Though the campaign is Stevens’s narrative vehicle, the book reads like one of his African capers, with Stevens noting all manner of anthropological curiosities and outrageous characters while serving as his own best foil. (“Years ago, I had learned that the secret to success in political consulting is to work for candidates who were going to win anyway,” he confesses.) In Stevens’s hands, the race is the latest in a series of ridiculous undertakings––practically a stunt––which the book’s subtitle more or less announces: “Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics.” There is barely a hint of the cosmic importance that might attach itself to such an enterprise.<br /><br />Stevens’s previous travel books had sold relatively well and received critical acclaim. But The Big Enchilada fell flat. Within his publishing house, Simon &amp; Schuster, there was a sense that the public didn’t want to read about a few charming rogues from Texas in the aftermath of the wrenching recount, no matter how deftly executed. The campaign books that became best-sellers, like Jeffrey Toobin’s treatment of the standoff in Florida, satisfied people’s desire for more partisan, muckraking stories.<br /><br />Stevens was disappointed. It was the first nonfiction book he’d written in years that The New York Times didn’t review, and he believed he was shunned for political reasons. “I know Stuart was very convinced that the fix was in,” says Klayman. Before the book was released, Stevens had sent it to Al Franken in hopes of scoring a blurb. They had met a few times on the campaign trail, and Franken had always been gracious. But Franken declined the request. According to Klayman, he wrote back a “pugnacious” e-mail panning Stevens’s breezy depiction of the recount.<br /><br />Ironically for someone who had devoted much of his professional life to politics, Stevens was suddenly finding the Bush-era too ... political. Many of his friends from writing and television were liberals, and he never had trouble getting along with them. They’d gush about how well-read and cosmopolitan he was, how he shattered their mental image of a Republican gunslinger. But now politics was inescapable. Suddenly the entire country seemed to array itself on one side or the other of a cavernous divide.<br /><br />Not long after the 2000 election, Stevens attended a dinner party with several prominent journalists, including an editor at The New York Times and a former editor of George magazine. It was a dreary affair. A guest cornered him on the balcony and hectored him about the recount. Over dinner, his companions couldn’t stop talking about the campaign. Stevens had always enjoyed these gatherings as a chance to escape politics. He weakly tried to change the subject. He looked like he would rather be anywhere else in the world.<br /><br />The devil-may-care routine had begun to run its course. The only one who didn’t fully grasp it was Stevens himself. <br /><br /> <br /><br />FOR THE 2008 ELECTION, Mitt Romney hired an all-star team of strategists representing some of the finest minds in Republican politics––and, when he lost, he concluded it was a terrible idea. With so many smart people in the room, it was nearly impossible to stick with a decision.<br /><br />The next time around, Romney knew he wanted one chief strategist. And he knew he wanted that person to be Stuart Stevens, whom he first considered hiring while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and had briefly employed during his previous run for president. Romney was impressed by Stevens’s smarts and felt they had more in common than met the eye.<br /><br />There was a minor hitch, however: Stevens had gradually been losing his appetite for politics. He complained that campaigns were taking longer and longer, crowding out his extracurricular thrill-seeking, while critics increasingly panned his firm’s ads as formulaic. “I got the sense that, after the Bush campaign, he might be thinking about hanging up his six-gun, hanging up his spurs, and doing something else,” says Peter Matson, his literary agent. But Stevens was up for one last romp if he would be leading the mission. “He wasn’t going to do [the Romney campaign] unless he was going to be The Guy,” says one former colleague.<br /><br />As it happens, the relationship between Romney and Stevens has proved remarkably stable. They’re both hyper-literate and often pass books back and forth. “Stuart sort of has this intellectual connection with Romney,” says the colleague. They’re also fond of quoting movies to one another––Annie Hall and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are favorites––and share an impish sense of humor. Getting off a plane in New Hampshire in 2011, Romney turned to Stevens and, according to an e-book by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas, cracked: “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done by, like, twenty times. ... I just had no idea. Why didn’t somebody tell me?” Without missing a beat, Stevens replied, “You didn’t ask me.”<br /><br />Romney and Stevens spend hours together working on speeches, which both men take pride in, and on debate prep, which Stevens essentially masterminds. When Stevens comes across a detail he deems useful for Romney—as when he discovered that Rick Perry had advocated eliminating Social Security in his campaign book, Fed Up!––it’s only a matter of time before Romney transmits it to the world.<br /><br />The ongoing banter has also produced more ambitious ideas, including a small-town bus tour that Romney kicked off in June. The trip, a kind of rolling tribute to Americana, was partly inspired by Romney’s fond memories of his family outings. John Steinbeck allusions, a favorite of Stevens’s thanks to their Depression-era resonance, featured prominently in Romney’s kick-off speech.<br /><br />But just because Romney and Stevens get along doesn’t mean they’re a great team. In fact, they have similar blind spots. Consider their take on what Romney’s stump persona should be. Stevens likes his politicians simple and unadorned, in keeping with his aesthetic style. Even as he has depicted his boss as an economic fixer, Stevens has sought to contrast Romney’s plainspoken good-guy-ness with a remote and self-regarding president. Romney has clearly embraced the motif. After a major economic speech by Obama, Romney told a crowd in Wisconsin that “he’s a very eloquent person and is able to ... tell you that night is day and day is night. But people know better.” Romney even played the speech for laughs: “Yesterday, the president gave a speech––a very long speech,” he said in New Hampshire. He repeated the joke at several campaign stops.<br /><br />Certainly, there was a time when a Republican nominee could control his own narrative with relative ease––or, at least, with enough advertising dollars and straight-faced conviction. George W. Bush’s 2000 convention film, which Stevens produced, bathed him in a dusty authenticity as he surveyed his ranch and discoursed on leadership. The glow lasted all the way through Election Day. But somewhere between the Florida recount and John Kerry’s swift-boating, a whole liberal industrial complex––cable channels like MSNBC, watch dogs like Media Matters for America, blog partisans like Daily Kos––began hacking away at the artifice. It has left Romney, already less believable in the just-folks role, badly exposed.<br /><br />Stevens’s indifference to this shift--and to the partisan bloodlust that fuels it––helps explain how the campaign was caught flat-footed by allegations that Romney hadn’t severed his ties to Bain Capital until 2002, three years after he’d initially claimed. “The headline story above the fold in The [Boston] Globe: ‘ROMNEY STAYED LONGER AT BAIN’ ... is totally, totally misleading,” one Romney adviser complained to me. “Maybe the newspaper’s got an angle because of political bias or because it sells copies––who knows what?” But the Bain story didn’t reflect the sudden vindictiveness of the mainstream media. It reflected the holy-war relentlessness of the left. As The Globe later acknowledged, the story was initially driven by enterprising bloggers at the liberal websites Talking Points Memo and Mother Jones.<br /><br />It wasn’t the only time the campaign has been out of step with the new hair-trigger ethos of American politics. Last fall, Romney released a commercial with video of Obama announcing that, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” The ad, which Stevens conceived, was incredibly dishonest––the footage was from a 2008 campaign appearance in which Obama had quoted a McCain adviser. But Stevens convinced Romney that their ethical obligations would be fulfilled by distributing a press release explaining the origin of the quote.<br /><br />It didn’t work. The ad sent both the White House and the campaign press into hysterics. For over a week, pundits clucked about the spot’s egregiousness. John King, CNN’s pathologically neutral correspondent, called it “reprehensible.” NBC’s Brian Williams featured it as a case study in “how dirty this campaign will be.” Stevens could hardly believe the blowback--it was an ad, after all, a mere act of propaganda. What was the big deal?<br /><br /> <br /><br />AND THEN there is the right. Ever since Romney first started running for president in 2006, he has struggled to deal with the influence of conservatives in the GOP. Among Romney’s many sins: his once-progressive positions on abortion and gay rights; his vote for Democrat Paul Tsongas in the 1992 presidential primary; and, most of all, his Massachusetts health care reform bill, which became the model for Obama’s.<br /><br />There’s also the lingering feeling that Romney doesn’t really go in for ideology of any kind. No one who qualifies as “severely conservative” would ever think to describe himself that way, as Romney did earlier this year. In his various incarnations as a candidate, he has campaigned as a progressive, a conservative, a technocrat, and a populist, suggesting his deepest attachment is to winning.<br /><br />Unfortunately for Romney, his chief strategist isn’t much better at navigating the minefield on the right. Stevens’s signature approach to dealing with conservatives is to slog through the primaries while conceding as little to them as possible. In 2007, he briefly worked on John McCain’s campaign for president. At the time, McCain was the moderate and Romney was challenging him from the right. Stevens urged McCain to go relentlessly negative––“you have to keep your foot on his throat” was his mantra. The idea was to solve McCain’s problem with his base by eliminating the conservative threat. But the McCain brain trust was perplexed. “The base’s concerns with John had nothing to do with Romney,” said one McCain aide. “It didn’t make logical sense to us.”<br /><br />In 2012, Stevens sought to reprise the attack strategy for Romney, except with an added wrinkle. Rather than simply knee-cap his conservative rivals, Romney would also channel the country’s frustration with Obama. This would appeal to the base, which considered the president illegitimate, without alienating general election voters, who considered Obama’s economic policies a failure. Romney could capture the nomination without moving rightward. He wouldn’t even have to renounce his own health care plan so long as he was sufficiently scathing toward Obamacare.<br /><br />Somewhat unusually for a presidential candidate, Romney has been deeply involved in hashing out his own campaign strategy. “Romney plays a big role in the strategic direction,” says one Romney aide. “Stuart is the artiste.” And Romney liked what he heard. He was especially hesitant to abandon his health care record and was heartened that Stevens urged him not to.<br /><br />The problem was that the plan badly underestimated the fever on the right. “I don’t think [Stevens] understands the base at all,” says the McCain aide. “He tends to take [the base] for granted. ... There’s no art to what they’re doing.”<br /><br />Romney’s anti-Obama posture never felt like enough for conservatives--it didn’t help that he kept calling Obama “well-intentioned.” During the primaries, Romney was forced into harder-line positions than either he or Stevens would have liked in order to fend off the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. Worse, Romney has doubled-down on those positions ever since. If the normal trajectory for a candidate is to edge toward his base during the primary and the center during the general election, Romney has accomplished something closer to the opposite.<br /><br />While speaking at a private fund-raiser not long after locking up the nomination, Romney suggested that he might make his tax plan ever-so-slightly more progressive than he’d previously hinted by scaling back deductions for the wealthy. But conservatives howled when two outlets reported the remarks, and the campaign spent the next 24 hours in retreat. A surrogate had to explain that Romney was just “discussing ideas that came up on the campaign trail,” not contemplating a “change in policy.” The following evening, Romney stood before a Tea Party group in Philadelphia to offer abject assurances. “Taxes by their very definition limit our freedom,” he said. “They should be as small as possible.” In recent months, Romney has made similar bows toward conservatives on health care and immigration.<br /><br />On one level, any strategist working for Romney would have faced a nearly impossible finesse-job in a GOP primary, given the candidate’s impure ideological past. But Stevens, who finds few things more alien than the fervor of a true-believer, is uniquely unsuited to the task. Stevens failed to see that irate conservatives would be more skeptical if Romney moved right under pressure from opponents––as he did in response to Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum––than if he’d done so on his own terms at the start of the campaign.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the rest of the country sees a candidate yanked around by his most extreme supporters, a spectacle that can’t easily be explained away. In May, after The New Republic wrote that Romney had moved far right on immigration during the primaries by running a series of negative ads on the issue, Stevens insisted to the author that “the Romney campaign has not run any ads on the issue of illegal immigration.” When she cited a video in which Romney lacerated Perry for granting in-state college tuition to students who entered the country illegally, Stevens conceded that there had been a “Web video,” but maintained there had never been a bona fide ad. The exchange recalled a line from The Big Enchilada, in which Stevens quipped: “I was confident we could come up with a spin. You could spin anything if you did it with enough confidence.”<br /><br />The irony is that Stevens’s view of the race as a referendum on Obama’s handling of the economy is largely sound. Despite sustaining a monthlong attack on his record at Bain and his personal finances, Romney remains roughly even with Obama, according to recent polls. With the economy continuing to sputter, the only major development during that month was a New York Times poll suggesting diminished confidence in the president’s economic management. But as long as Romney lets his base pin him to so many deeply unpopular policies (tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of Wall Street, the voucher-ization of Medicare), Obama can turn the contest into a death-struggle between right-wing radicalism and middle-of-the-road progressivism pretty much at will.<br /><br />The race is far from over, but friends in the publishing industry have already approached Stevens about writing an insider account of the 2012 campaign. There are any number of reasons why the book won’t happen, not least of them is Romneyworld’s all-powerful code of omertà. But the biggest is surely that, with unemployment so high and the country so raw and divided, it’s hard to find the comedy in this race, even for an accomplished send-up artist like Stevens.<br /><br />Then again, it’s not impossible to imagine Stevens stirring up some mischief a few years down the line. Sometime after the campaign ends, there will be another highly charged, partisan event: an HBO docudrama revealing the gory details behind George W. Bush’s domestic spying efforts, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, two New York Times reporters. When the film debuts, it will almost certainly dredge up all the anger and bitterness of the Bush years. The former president and those closest to him will undoubtedly dislike it. And when the credits roll, they may discover something a bit surprising: The screenwriter for the project is one Stuart Stevens––the very same Stuart Stevens who had so much fun helping to elect Bush in the first place.</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramElections & Political PartiesThe New RepublicMon, 06 Aug 2012 13:59:28 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>70240 at http://newamerica.netWhy Hasn’t the LIBOR Scandal Blown Up? No Victimshttp://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/why_hasn_t_the_libor_scandal_blown_up_no_victims_69790
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<span class="date-display-single">July 11, 2012</span></div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<p>A number of commentators have wondered why the rigging of LIBOR—the most widely used interest-rate in the world—hasn’t caused the uproar in this country that it’s provoked in Britain. The easy answer is that no U.S. bank has fessed up or been outed over its role in manipulating LIBOR, unlike in Britain, where Barclays has agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars in fines and fired its top three executives.<br /> <br />But, never fear, there’s every indication that American banks were up to similar hijinks, and that U.S. investigators are on the case. Names will be named here soon enough. If nothing else, the congressional grandstanders are moving in on the action.<br /> <br />Having said that, unless the revelations (and the e-mails) get a lot more lurid than they have in Britain, I’m not sure the scandal is ever going to catch fire on this side of the Atlantic. The reason is that it’s too damn hard to find a compelling victim.<br /> <br />Allow me to explain: LIBOR is partly used to set interest rates on products consumers use, like mortgages, credit cards, and student loans. It’s also partly used to determine the interest rates at which corporations can borrow. But mostly it's used to settle derivatives contracts, which are essentially bets between two traders or institutions on whether interest rates will go up or down at some point in the future.<br /> <br />The LIBOR allegations involving Barclays are two-fold. The first is that, between 2005 and 2007, the bank helped suppress LIBOR to in order come out ahead on certain derivatives trades. The second is that, during the financial crisis that began in 2007 and intensified in 2008, Barclays helped suppress LIBOR so that the outside world would think it was healthier than it was. (LIBOR officially reflects the interest rate at which one big bank can borrow from another and gets set daily when banks report this rate to an industry group. The more costly it is for banks to borrow from one another, the higher LIBOR, and the worse shape people assume the banks are in.)<br /> <br />So in both cases, LIBOR ended up lower than it otherwise would have been absent the alleged manipulation. Which raises the question: Who got hurt? The answer isn’t immediately obvious. Anyone whose mortgage, credit card, or student loan interest-rate depended on LIBOR would have paid less, not more. Same with any business whose loans were tied to LIBOR. The most obvious losers are the people involved in derivatives contracts—the people who bet on interests rates to rise and therefore couldn’t collect when they’d won (or at least not as much as they had coming to them). But these are typically rich hedge fund managers or traders at other banks—not exactly the types who garner sympathetic ink in the popular press.<br /> <br />Now, that’s a bit simplistic. We’re learning that there almost certainly some smaller-time victims. Municipalities, for example, sometimes use derivatives to protect against interest-rate spikes. If LIBOR was kept artificially low, many could have been cheated out of tens of millions of dollars that these bets should have produced for them. Similarly, a lot of pension funds place interest-rate related bets, meaning hundreds of thousands of retirees may have been cheated out of earnings they were by all rights entitled to.<br /> <br />But, even here, things aren’t so clear cut. After all, while there are many municipalities and pension funds positioned to gain when LIBOR rises, there are presumably a large number positioned to gain when LIBOR falls. It is, in short, very difficult to find a whole class of victims to feel sorry for, as opposed to individual grievance-bearers, which makes me think the political half-life of this scandal will be limited. (I’d guess the reason this hasn’t kept the scandal from exploding in England is that Barclays was already a cultural flashpoint, with its brash American CEO and his gagillion-dollar bonuses. The whole country was primed for a reason to string the guy up, and they got one.)<br /> <br />Does that mean the LIBOR scandal isn’t a big deal? Not at all. As I argued in this earlier post, it’s a very big deal. But it’s just a bit more abstract than your typical scandal. To see this, I’d propose the following (crude) analogy, in honor of yesterday’s baseball all-star game. Suppose the six wealthiest Major League teams got together and convinced the commissioner to move in every park’s fence ten feet without the rest of the league knowing. (Suppose they benefit because fans like to see more home runs hit, and they make their money on TV revenues.) The upshot is that some teams would give up more home runs and lose certain games, but some teams would hit more home runs and win certain games. Once the conspiracy was unearthed, fans of the first set of teams would complain loudly; fans of the second would probably keep quiet. But, overall, it would be hard to say that a certain class of team benefited more than another class. Or even that certain teams consistently benefited more than others. It would appear to be a kind of wash. (Yes, some teams are built more around hitting and some more around pitching, so you can imagine some small, systematic effect. But set that aside for the sake of argument.)<br /> <br />And yet, just because the conspiracy resulted in a wash doesn’t mean we shouldn’t or wouldn’t be outraged. All baseball fans would be outraged on some level because the integrity of the game had been compromised. Once you realize that a small group of powerful owners can manipulate one aspect of the game, even if the effects aren’t world-historical, who knows what else they manipulated, or what they might manipulate in the future. You never look at the game in quite the same way.<br /> <br />This is about where the financial system is as a result of the LIBOR scandal. Except that, even when compared with baseball, people hadn’t assumed much integrity in the first place.<br /> </p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramEconomic GrowthElections & Political PartiesThe New RepublicThu, 19 Jul 2012 18:01:49 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>69790 at http://newamerica.netAlcove 4: Writing Obamahttp://newamerica.net/node/69196
Writing about the life of the President of the United States can be a daunting task - just ask Robert Caro. The mission is even more complicated when the commander-in-chief is an esteemed author himself like President Barack Obama.
But since Obama took office, a few masterful writers have successfully unearthed hidden stories from his past and present. Join the New America Foundation for a conversation with three authors who have helped reveal the real Barack Obama to the American public. David Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author of Obama: The Story, Noam Scheiber, The New Republic senior editor and author of The Escape Artists and Jodi Kantor, New York Times correspondent and author of The Obamas will disclose the obstacles they faced - and the lessons they learned - as they told the story of the president and first family.BooksOtherWriting about the life of the President of the United States can be a daunting task - just ask Robert Caro. The mission is even more complicated when the commander-in-chief is an esteemed author himself like President Barack Obama. But since Obama took office, a few masterful writers have successfully unearthed hidden stories from his past and present. Join the New America Foundation for a conversation with three authors who have helped reveal the real Barack Obama to the American public. David Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author of Obama: The Story, Noam Scheiber, The New Republic senior editor and author of The Escape Artists and Jodi Kantor, New York Times correspondent and author of The Obamas will disclose the obstacles they faced - and the lessons they learned - as they told the story of the president and first family.Writing Obama; David Maraniss, Noam Scheiber, Jodi Kantor, and moderator Franklin Foer discuss the challenges of writing about the 44th president of the United States.noFri, 29 Jun 2012 16:55:36 +000069196 at http://newamerica.netThe Political Upshot of the Roberts Votehttp://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/the_political_upshot_of_the_roberts_vote_69314
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<span class="date-display-single">June 28, 2012</span></div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">June 28, 2012</span> </div>
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<div>A number of commentators have noted that one upshot of the Supreme Court largely affirming the Affordable Care Act is that it will help shape public opinion on the law, which is still a bit amorphous. I agree, and think the effect could be even larger than they realize.</div><div> </div><div>If you look at recent polling, you find that around 35 percent of Americans support the law, around 40 to 45 percent oppose it, and the rest don’t really have an opinion. That suggests that about 20 to 25 percent of the country is in play, and the fact that the court has stamped the law with its imprimatur will surely sway some of them. </div><div> </div><div>But when pollsters specifically asked about the forthcoming Supreme Court ruling, they found an even bigger potential for movement. For example, a Wall Street Journal poll out earlier this week asked voters if they’d be "pleased," "unpleased," or have "mixed feelings" if the Court upheld the law. Twenty-eight percent said they’d be pleased, 35 percent said they’d be displeased, and 34 percent said they’d have mixed feelings. In the same poll, 41 percent opposed the law, suggesting that a not insignificant number of health-care opponents (6 percentage points, or about one-seventh) would be open to reconsidering their feelings—they would not be “displeased”—if the Court upheld it.</div><div> </div><div>And that’s where John Roberts comes in. Had Anthony Kennedy been the deciding vote, the conventional wisdom would have been that this was a partisan decision with an unreliable and unpredictable swing-voter more or less arbitrarily siding with the liberals. But with the Court’s conservative chief justice providing the fifth vote, the decision has real heft. Not only is this likely to grab the attention of voters who had no opinion beforehand (though opinion-formation is simply beyond the capacity of some of them), it’s likely to get the attention of the fraction of health care opponents who told pollsters they wouldn’t necessarily be upset if the court affirmed the decision. And that could be a very big deal for the political legitimacy of the health care law going forward. </div><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramThe New RepublicFri, 06 Jul 2012 15:52:15 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>69314 at http://newamerica.netThe Sidebar: The Politics of Mormonism and Wonder Womenhttp://newamerica.net/node/69124
Noam Scheiber and Liza Mundy discuss Anne Marie Slaughter's controversial Atlantic magazine cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All", and explore facets of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Scheiber talks about one way Romney's Mormon background may have helped him financially this election, and Mundy explains how Romney's faith could impact his policies affecting women -- if only he would address the subject. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts. New America Fellows ProgramBooksWorkplace FlexibilityFeminismImmigrationReligionSocial CohesionFamily & ChildrenNoam Scheiber and Liza Mundy discuss Anne Marie Slaughter's controversial Atlantic magazine cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All", and explore facets of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Scheiber talks about one way Romney's Mormon background may have helped him financially this election, and Mundy explains how Romney's faith could impact his policies affecting women -- if only he would address the subject. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts. Noam Scheiber and Liza Mundy discuss Anne Marie Slaughter's controversial Atlantic magazine cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All", and explore facets of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Scheiber talks aboutnoWed, 27 Jun 2012 19:21:00 +000069124 at http://newamerica.netScheiber: Romney's Claim About My Book Is 'False' | TPMhttp://newamerica.net/node/68304
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<span class="date-display-single">June 7, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>I don't believe that it's substantively true,” <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, author of The Escape Artists, told TPM by phone Thursday morning. On Wednesday Romney said President Obama and his aides believed the health care reform law would harm the recovery but <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNECMOgH0Pj89y3IfVYJH8VFcvrgXA&amp;url=http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/noam-scheiber-mitt-romney-escape-artists-health-care-economy.php">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramTPMThu, 07 Jun 2012 15:05:17 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>68304 at http://newamerica.netEconomy Is Just A Sideshow For Obama | National Posthttp://newamerica.net/node/68333
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<span class="date-display-single">June 7, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>The latest proof is The Escape Artists, a new book by <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, subtitled How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery. While the author's grasp of economics is not much better than the President's, he paints an entertaining and insightful picture of the <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNGsKPC0J5-XtcgJKDXw5SVszGFMwA&amp;url=http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/06/07/economy-is-just-a-sideshow-for-obama/">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramNational PostThu, 07 Jun 2012 23:41:57 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>68333 at http://newamerica.netRomney: Obama Slowed Recovery To Push Obamacare | Newsok.Comhttp://newamerica.net/node/68289
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<span class="date-display-single">June 6, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>Speaking to an audience at USAA, an insurance and financial services company headquartered in San Antonio, Romney cited a book, "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery," by the liberal journalist <b>Noam Scheiber</b>.</p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNFiHUqguLWL7Zge4VE7uy5DR_q8AA&amp;url=http://newsok.com/romney-obama-slowed-recovery-to-push-obamacare/article/feed/390941">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramWed, 06 Jun 2012 20:57:09 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>68289 at http://newamerica.netThe Partnerhttp://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/the_partner_67752
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<span class="date-display-single">May 21, 2012</span></div>
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Meet Mitt Romney's most trusted adviser. </div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">May 21, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>Any taxonomy of first friends includes a few familiar types. There’s the amiable glad-hander destined for the outer Cabinet, like George W. Bush crony Don Evans. There’s the scheming, scandal-prone loyalist, like the Clinton hanger-on Harry Thomason, of Travelgate infamy. And then there’s the discreet consigliere who serves alternatively as fixer, sounding board, chief surrogate, and all-around defender of the faith.<br /><br />Personal friends with such outsize influence are actually quite rare in presidential politics. Within recent administrations, only Valerie Jarrett really fits the profile. But, as it happens, Jarrett won’t be the only Valerie Jarrett–figure advising a presidential candidate this year. Mitt Romney has his own longtime-pal-cum-alter-ego, a 56-year-old ex-Bain Capital partner named Bob White.<br /><br />White, who is trim with graying brown hair, was one of Romney’s original hires when launching the private-equity firm back in the 1980s. He has been at Romney’s side in every major endeavor he’s undertaken since, from the Olympics to the campaign trail. Over the course of Romney’s career, White has served as debate prepper, personnel vetter, designated gut-checker, in-house historian, and diplomatic envoy. It was White who found Romney a campaign manager for his run for governor, White who headed his transition to the Massachusetts statehouse, White who has chaired his campaigns for president.<br /><br />Since the start of the Republican primaries, White has served as the chief advice-broker within the campaign. “Are we a family that has internal squabbles? Absolutely,” says Ron Kaufman, a top Romney adviser. “One reason it works is Bob. People go to Bob all the time and say, ‘You’ve got to tell Mitt this.’ ... Knowing how to do it, when to do it, is his huge talent.” White has also weighed in personally at key moments. When pressure built on Romney to release his tax returns, White helped persuade the candidate to take his time, arguing, as another adviser puts it, that “you never release something that’s five hundred pages long or more till you understand it.” And he has helped formulate retorts to attacks on Romney’s wealth. When Newt Gingrich badgered Romney for investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, White observed that Romney didn’t own stock in the disgraced mortgage giants; his blind trust owned bonds through a mutual fund—a less direct investment than Gingrich’s own Fannie and Freddie holdings. Romney made the point in a Florida debate to devastating effect.<br /><br />White’s status in Romneyworld is all the more remarkable given that the former Massachusetts governor is often described as essentially friendless—the one contemporary pol who is even more of a loner than Barack Obama himself. But Romney’s affection for White is such that he refers to him simply as “TQ”—short for “The Quail,” an old Bain nickname. (The “bobwhite” is a species of quail, the joke being that there is nothing remotely skittish or meek about the actual Bob White.) Which, in the end, is what makes White such an intriguing figure. For a politician often viewed as maddeningly opaque—whose persona even the most charitable observers concede has shifted over time—there may be nothing so revealing as his choice of trusty wingman.<br /><br /> <br /><br />PERHAPS THE EASIEST WAY to explain the attraction of the consigliere-pal is that he or she brings qualities the aspiring pol lacks. Obama was a nobody in Chicago when he met Jarrett, a consummate insider with deep ties to the city’s establishment. Romney, by contrast, has pedigree to spare. In White—who was the first in his family to attend college—Romney befriended the self-made success he sometimes romanticizes on the campaign trail.<br /><br />Whereas Romney often appears stiff and reserved and struggles to make small talk, White, a former college hockey player, is preternaturally comfortable in his own skin. As Peter Flaherty, a senior campaign adviser, puts it, “He is just as at ease whether he’s talking with the person selling him a doughnut at Dunkin’ Donuts or the person selling him Dunkin’ Donuts.” (In 2006, Bain Capital actually acquired a share of the company.)<br /><br />This quality has been paying dividends for Romney since he and White were colleagues at Bain. In 1991, Bain &amp; Company, the corporate parent of Bain Capital, was drowning in red ink and enlisted Romney to save it. Romney realized the only way to ward off bankruptcy was to ask anyone with a claim on the parent company to make do with less: bankers, suppliers, even Bain’s founding partners, who had run up $200 million in debt so they could cash out their stakes. White was the lieutenant Romney dispatched to sweet-talk the holdouts. “They’d say, ‘Bill Bain is more at fault than I am. He should have to give more.’ Or someone would say, ‘My founding stake came later, I’m less at fault,’” recalls one person involved. “Bob’s the guy ... who said, ‘We’re going to talk about this till we get it done.’” In the end, White persuaded the company’s bankers to roll over their loans, its suppliers to take discounts, and the founders to return half the $200 million they’d awarded themselves.<br /><br />White’s skills transferred easily to the political arena. Several days after Romney entered the race for governor in 2002, White paid a visit to Jim Rappaport, a Massachusetts businessman running for the state’s number-two job. Rappaport was the favorite to win the lieutenant governor nomination and Romney had told him he’d stay out of the primary. But White and Mike Murphy, the candidate’s chief consultant, decided that a ticket of two wealthy suits was a sure loser. White’s delegation informed Rappaport they were backing Kerry Healey, a failed legislative candidate who had just become party chairwoman. “I thought we were going to get nunchucked—there were people yelling at us,” says Ben Coes, the Romney campaign manager who was present for the encounter. “But Bob’s the kind of guy who could be urinating on your shoes while talking to you, and you’d thank him afterward.” (For the record, White’s charms were partially lost on Rappaport, who says his “Thank you” was more along the lines of “Just get the bleep out of my office.” But he did support Romney in the fall.)<br /><br />White has also countered Romney’s natural tendency toward caution. When Bill Bain first tapped him to run Bain Capital in the 1980s, Romney passed, worrying that failure would blot his sterling CV and cost him financially. According to biographers Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, he only accepted once Bain offered to give him his old job back if the venture folded, along with any raises he would have accrued and a cover story to protect his reputation.<br /><br />But, as a politician, Romney has sometimes taken audacious risks—like the decision to tackle health care reform as governor. More often than not, it’s White who has bucked up his resolve. Just over a month out from Election Day in 2002, Romney’s top aides convened at his Belmont home to hash out their debate strategy. The consensus was that the format had not been kind to Romney in the past, and so there was concern about drawing attention to it. But Romney’s press aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, proposed doubling down: asking NBC poohbah Tim Russert to moderate a debate the week before Election Day. The benefit was “getting a national figure ... who was more likely to ask [Romney’s Democratic opponent Shannon O’Brien] the tough questions that the local papers were unlikely to ask her,” recalls Brian Shortsleeve, a deputy campaign manager at the time.<br /><br />Initially there was skepticism. But White liked the idea and persuaded Romney that the reward was worth the risk. “Bob and Eric Fehrnstrom are the guys who made that happen,” says Shortsleeve. It worked. Russert put O’Brien on the defensive over taxes, the death penalty, and abortion. Romney’s poll numbers surged after the debate.<br /><br /> <br /><br />AS A CANDIDATE in 2008, Barack Obama spoke often about bringing once-in-a-generation change, but it was hard to know how serious he was. In retrospect, though, there was one foolproof indication that he’d swing for the fences: Valerie Jarrett. Within Obamaland, Jarrett’s role was making sure Obama fulfilled his historical destiny. “Valerie considers herself the protector of Barack’s immortal soul,” says Jim Cauley, Obama’s Senate campaign manager. “She thinks she has to protect him from political hacks like Rahm [Emanuel] and [David] Axelrod. ... Valerie has a thing about him not selling out.” That his closest friend and adviser saw him in quasi-messianic terms suggested Obama probably did, too.<br /><br />What does Romney’s top campaign buddy tell us about him? At first blush, it would seem to be that, for all his flirtations with culture-war conservatism, border-policing maximalism, and supply-side economics, he remains a corporate technocrat at heart. “[Bob’s] main role ... is trying to get the best people, trying to drive actions and decisions, versus a specific ideological bent,” says Coes. One of Romney’s signature initiatives as governor was what he called the “Business Resource Team,” the mandate of which was to coordinate among the roughly 20 state agencies and industry groups with influence over the economy. “We got them to work together so that if a business wanted to expand, it’s easier, they get a faster response,” says Ranch Kimball, Romney’s former economic development czar. “The governor believed in it. Bob did, too.”<br /><br />But just because White and Romney don’t have an ideology doesn’t mean they lack a worldview. In fact, they have a distinct worldview. To them, business and finance aren’t just amoral, but forces for good. They believe achievement in the corporate world is virtuous, not merely lucrative.<br /><br />No surprise, then, that ever since Romney entered politics, White has been the most consistent voice on behalf of embracing his record at Bain. White touted it to reporters during Romney’s first run for office in 1994 and was central to the calculations that credit Romney for helping to create tens of thousands of jobs there. During this presidential run, when opponents have attacked Romney as a predatory capitalist, White has been a leading internal advocate of Romney’s response: “I’m not going to apologize for being successful.” “People tried hard in the primary, as the president is now, to make Bain a negative issue,” says Kaufman. “But, because of Bob’s extensive knowledge, etcetera, it made it easier for us to make it a positive.”<br /><br />Of course, just because “success” served Romney well in a Republican primary doesn’t mean it will work in the general election, when voters may look skeptically at a record of corporate buyouts. And the campaign understands this. “It’s going to need to evolve for the general,” concedes another Romney adviser. Still, the evolution will have limits. Though Romney’s record reveals flashes of compassion, as president he is unlikely to brood about income inequality or any of capitalism’s hard edges. If one can extrapolate from Bob White, Romney believes such disparities and dislocation are the flip side of a vibrant economy—that capitalism works remarkably well the way it is.</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramElections & Political PartiesThe New RepublicMon, 21 May 2012 13:42:35 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>67752 at http://newamerica.netRomney Cites New Book On Obama During NH Speech | My Fox Washington DChttp://newamerica.net/node/67705
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<span class="date-display-single">May 18, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>HILLSBOROUGH, NH -- Mitt Romney had a book recommendation for supporters in New Hampshire on Friday, telling them he is reading the latest tome about the Obama administration -- <b>Noam Scheiber's</b> "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
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</ul>New America Fellows ProgramFri, 18 May 2012 19:59:54 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>67705 at http://newamerica.netOn Marriage, The Risk Is Romney'shttp://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/on_marriage_the_risk_is_romneys_67409
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<span class="date-display-single">May 10, 2012</span></div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">May 10, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>In endorsing gay marriage, Barack Obama may have gotten ahead of public opinion on one of the most emotional issues in politics. And yet I can’t help thinking the move poses more risk for Mitt Romney. Am I crazy?<br /><br />The conventional wisdom is that the president’s decision firms up his base, especially the portion that helps fund his campaign, but potentially hurts him among swing voters. I’m not convinced that’s right--the Pew Research Center reports that a plurality of swing voters in Southern states oppose gay marriage, but the only states in play are North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, which skew more moderate. And there are many more battlegrounds outside the South, where attitudes are much more hospitable. But assume for the sake of argument that the CW applies. Even so, it misses the way the issue will play out as a practical matter.<br /><br />Most obviously, Romney now has to decide how he responds. Thus far, the de facto GOP nominee has been content to robotically cite his opposition to gay marriage and his support for a constitutional ban. But his heart is rarely in it. Indeed, he's been pretty determined to duck the issue since Sunday, when Joe Biden shoved it to the center of the national conversation. That’s partly, I think, because Romney’s no bigot. (The guy appointed the first chief diversity officer in the history of his state, for crying out loud.) But it’s mostly because, while swing voters may be ambivalent about gay marriage itself, they’re much less comfortable with displays of intolerance. Many of the same voters who profess squeamishness over the idea would punish a politician for crusading against it. If you don’t believe me, just consider that, prior to this week, the White House was perfectly comfortable opposing bans on gay marriage even though it stopped conspicuously short of embracing gay marriage.<br /><br />Unfortunately for Romney, the one thing Obama’s announcement deprives him of is opportunities to duck the issue. Given the way it’s energized conservatives—Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council was quick to thunder that “today’s announcement almost ensures that marriage will again be a major issue in the presidential election”—Romney now faces enormous pressure to amplify his position. Conservatives will ask about it constantly. They will insist on highlighting it in the party platform and at this summer’s convention. Rote box-checking of the sort he’s practiced so far will no longer suffice.<br /><br />Now, a politician with more credibility among conservatives might be willing to take the guff to preserve his general-election prospects. But conservative cred is something Romney distinctly lacks. It’s the reason he had to take a hard-line stance on immigration during the primaries, and to throw his arms around Paul Ryan. I’d guess it’s the reason he didn’t distance himself from a supporter bent on indicting the president for treason this week.<br /><br />If George W. Bush were the GOP nominee, the response would be a no brainer: Continue to toe the party line when necessary but otherwise pretend the issue doesn’t exist. But Romney has no such luxury. Trying to minimize it will send barely-repressed conservative suspicions spewing forth like a geyser, while using gay marriage to shore up his right-wing bona fides will play pretty badly this fall. It’s a helluva dilemma. Kind of makes the president’s position look like a bit of a yawner.</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramSame Sex MarriageGay MarriageElections & Political PartiesSocial Issues & DemographicsThe New RepublicThu, 10 May 2012 15:51:31 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>67409 at http://newamerica.netBook Review: 'The Escape Artist' | Washington Timeshttp://newamerica.net/node/67196
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<span class="date-display-single">May 4, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>By James Srodes - Special to The Washington Times By <b>Noam Scheiber</b> It is inevitable that a man may campaign for the US presidency on one set of issues only to face entirely different challenges once he is in office. In 1979, I spent some time traveling <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
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</ul>New America Fellows ProgramWashington TimesFri, 04 May 2012 11:25:47 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>67196 at http://newamerica.netNoam Scheiber: Wall Street Hates Obama Because They Don'T Know Anything About ... | Business Insiderhttp://newamerica.net/node/67231
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<p><b>Noam Scheiber</b> knows a thing or two about Barack Obama — not only did he write, The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery, but he's also the editor of the The New Republic. So his new colum has to be taken seriously.</p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
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</ul>New America Fellows ProgramFri, 04 May 2012 20:10:34 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>67231 at http://newamerica.netFrom Hope to Hardballhttp://newamerica.net/publications/articles/2012/from_hope_to_hardball_66656
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<span class="date-display-single">April 20, 2012</span></div>
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How Barack Obama became Bill Clinton. </div>
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<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a> </div>
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<span class="date-display-single">April 20, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>Though it was obvious to almost no one at the time, Thursday, April 5, may have certified a momentous change in contemporary politics. It was that day when Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus was quoted saying that the Republican “war on women,” a favorite liberal talking point, was a creation of Democrats and the media—no more reality-based than a Republican “war on caterpillars.” It probably wasn’t the most outlandish comment a GOP operative uttered that hour. Yet, by lunchtime, Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter had denounced Priebus for suggesting that reproductive-health issues had all the cosmic significance of larva. Soon Cutter’s aggrieved response was all over the Internet and cable television. When I spoke with one strategist close to the White House the next day, he was utterly disbelieving: “The-war-on-caterpillars thing, I’m shocked it’s getting any legs.”<br /><br />Welcome to the Obama campaign, version 2.0. If, as Mario Cuomo once said, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then running for reelection may be something akin to grunting at regular intervals. In 2008, Obamaland prided itself on rejecting such brass-knuckle politicking, much of it perfected by Bill Clinton. “We don’t do war rooms,” was a Team Obama mantra, as one veteran of the campaign and the administration recalls. These days, by contrast, there are dozens of operatives raring to pounce on the slightest Republican misstep.<br /><br />The outsized war-room capabilities are hardly the only Clintonite technique the Obama apparatus has adopted. President Obama has rewarded his mega-donors with frequent trips to the White House. And, just as Clinton did in 1995 and 1996, Team Obama has lashed a moderate GOP front-runner to right-wingers in Congress and portrayed him as a mortal threat to the welfare state.<br /><br />Far from a badge of dishonor, though, the new ruthlessness is actually a sign of maturity. “It’s not like Bill Clinton created a war room because he had the personality for a war room,” says the Obama administration veteran. “He did it because that’s what you have to do today to respond to the crazy shit that comes your way.” What Obama and his team have accepted is that, while there’s a lot to be said for changing politics and elevating the discourse, your most important job as president is to defend your priorities. And the way to do that is to win.<br /><br /><br />BECAUSE OF Clinton’s reputation as the father of the permanent campaign and Obamaland’s disavowals of his techniques, it’s tempting to regard the two most recent Democratic presidents as diametric opposites. In many ways, however, Obama’s presidency has followed a remarkably Clintonian trajectory. Clinton also came into office hoping to bridge Washington’s partisan divide. As Bob Woodward reported in his book The Choice, Clinton was stunned when Republicans told him they would vote en masse against his deficit plan only hours into his presidency. “I didn’t run for president to be a bare-fanged partisan,” he told Woodward, before confessing that Republicans had turned him into one.<br /><br />Both men initially responded to their respective midterm routs in similar ways. Clinton, as Obama subsequently did, blamed the defeat on the overly legislative focus of his first two years in office (“I was a prime minister, not a president,” he told Woodward) and on his troubles marketing his health care plan. (Of course, Obama’s plan actually passed.)<br /><br />The major difference between the two after the midterms was their posture toward Republicans. Clinton went for the jugular early. By August of 1995, he had launched a major ad campaign attacking the Republican Congress for its designs on Medicare and vowing to defend the program from $270 billion in cuts. Almost daily beginning in late 1995, Clinton and his surrogates repeated their mantra of protecting “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment”—that is, the programs Republicans threatened to decimate. The White House even had a nickname for the refrain: “M2E2.” “It wasn’t elegant—I wouldn’t etch it in marble. But people fucking knew what was at stake,” recalls Paul Begala, a former Clinton strategist. When Bob Dole emerged as the Republican presidential nominee the following spring, he had little hope of separating himself from his party’s government-slashing ethos.<br /><br />Obama, on the other hand, spent more of his third year striking conciliatory notes as he negotiated with the GOP over the deficit. With the exception of a tough, high-profile speech that April, his White House consciously avoided flaying Republicans over their proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. He didn’t dwell on their anti-government nihilism until a speech in December, and even then he did so in broad strokes.<br /><br />The relative civility came to a clear end this month, however, when Obama turned up at an Associated Press luncheon and proceeded to lacerate the GOP over the handiwork of Representative Paul Ryan, whose budget proposal the House had recently passed. Obama talked, Clinton-style, about how the Ryan budget would squeeze seniors who depend on Medicare and bump as many as 19 million poor and disabled Americans off Medicaid. He argued that Ryan’s plan would cut 200,000 children from Head Start, roll back financial aid to ten million college students, and make it harder to “protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.” It was “M2E2” all over again. For good measure, Obama held Mitt Romney responsible for every letter of the Ryan plan, gleefully noting that the presumptive nominee had pronounced it to be “marvelous.”<br /><br /> <br /><br />ONE CAN OVERSTATE the degree to which Obama has changed, of course. By the summer of 2008, his campaign had a well-oiled rapid-response effort, which included current press secretary Ben LaBolt, among others. They just didn’t call it a “war room” or practice their dark arts as publicly or zealously. The recent trend is more “an evolution, not a shift,” says one campaign official from those days. Still, this person concedes, the campaign’s Chicago headquarters is “ready to be more forceful early on” this time around. “The press is more absurd,” explains a White House official. “In part because of Twitter, things have the potential to explode faster than they did before.”<br /><br />Within Team Obama, the change is not without anxiety. Mention the comparison to Clinton, and those involved in the Obama reelection effort will instinctively flinch. As one longtime Democratic operative sympathetic to the new approach puts it: “They have their own legacies to protect, I get that, too. I don’t think [David Axelrod] ever wants to see his name in the same sentence as [Clinton guru] Dick Morris.”<br /><br />Some of the anxiety centers around Cutter, who oversees the daily combat operation in Chicago and is legendary in Democratic circles for her Dresden-esque tactics. Whereas the communications apparatus for the Romney campaign, like Obama’s in 2008, must simultaneously sell policies, craft speeches, and win each news cycle, Cutter has the advantage of commanding a deep bench of operatives whose only focus is the latter. “The point is, that’s all they’re doing,” says the strategist close to the White House, noting that the West Wing shoulders the rest of the workload. This creates a major resource asymmetry, which Cutter has exploited with brutal efficiency. Chicago’s preferred formulations—on everything from the “Ryan-Romney budget” to Romney’s penchant for “hiding” the truth—reliably find their way into leading news outlets.*<br /><br />While such tactics can be highly effective in any given moment, the risk is that they ultimately taint the Obama brand. (In 2008, the campaign considered it undignified to spar with the RNC, as it did during the great caterpillar controversy.) Still, a spokesman says the Obama organization is very pleased with Cutter’s work. And it’s almost certainly the case that the aggressive stance is here to stay. Arguably the chief legacy of the extended GOP primary is that Romney found himself forced to embrace the Ryan budget. “I thought the most important date of the primary was the date that Romney used the Ryan budget to attack [Newt] Gingrich,” says the Obama administration veteran. “He had been dancing around the Ryan budget for the longest time.” But, having tied himself to Ryan, there’s no going back. It would be political malpractice not to seize on this.<br /><br />Many of Obama’s political aides have understood this for years. In fact, when Ryan proposed (and the House approved) a similar budget last spring, they had readied a p.r. assault on Republicans over the document. But they holstered their press releases when members of Obama’s economic team protested that this would blow up the deficit and debt-ceiling negotiations with Republicans.<br /><br />These days, however, some of Obama’s most enthusiastic advocates of bipartisan civility—such as former Chief of Staff Bill Daley—have been exiled, and many of those who remain have come full circle. For example, Daley’s replacement, Jack Lew, was an enthusiastic participant in last year’s deficit talks while serving as Obama’s budget director. But the experience was eye-opening. Lew would reach an understanding with the House leadership and then notice that positions had changed when negotiating with their aides.* He concluded that there could be no accommodation prior to the election. (A longtime Democratic wonk who is far more liberal than Daley, Lew also grasps the potential devastation of the Ryan cuts on a more visceral level.)<br /><br />Perhaps the best way to measure the staying power of the new toughness is to observe how Team Obama responds these days to critics of the approach. During their first few years in office, senior aides would often fret when the paragons of respectable centrism derided Obama’s rhetoric as too harsh or his proposals as too liberal. This time around, as the likes of David Brooks were knuckle-rapping Obama over budgetary hyperbole in his AP speech, the White House doubled-down. Office of Management and Budget staffers mounted a furious behind-the-scenes response, ultimately fighting to a draw with a “half true” rating from the fact-checking site Politifact. Around the West Wing, much was made over this triumph. Hope and change it was not. But sometimes you have to be willing to settle for a small victory instead.</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-url">
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New America Fellows ProgramPolitical HistoryElections & Political PartiesThe New RepublicFri, 20 Apr 2012 16:38:53 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>66656 at http://newamerica.netBook Review: 'The Escape Artists' By Noam Scheiber And 'Confidence Men' By Ron ... | Los Angeles Timeshttp://newamerica.net/node/65571
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<span class="date-display-single">March 22, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>In 'The Escape Artists' by <b>Noam Scheiber</b> and 'Confidence Men' by Ron Suskind, President Obama's economic recovery plan and his advisors are in the spotlight, but the books' analyses are off the mark in places. By David Lauter, Los Angeles Times On Oct.</p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
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</ul>New America Fellows ProgramLos Angeles TimesThu, 22 Mar 2012 07:04:27 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65571 at http://newamerica.netWall Street Ethics In Question | MSNBC.comhttp://newamerica.net/node/65393
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<span class="date-display-single">March 18, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>MSNBC political analyst Ezra Klein fills in for Chris Hayes, and is joined by Occupy the SEC's Alexis Goldstein, former Wall Street banker William Cohan, The New Republic's <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, and Columbia University's John McWhorter, to discuss the culture <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNErQ4A8CKqFqsD2a12GMwZ9FxLGTA&amp;url=http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up-with-chris-hayes/46774744/">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramMSNBC.comSun, 18 Mar 2012 14:54:42 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65393 at http://newamerica.netDid The Administration 'Fumble The Recovery'? | MSNBC.Comhttp://newamerica.net/node/65392
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<span class="date-display-single">March 18, 2012</span> </div>
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<p><b>Noam Scheiber</b> shares insights from his new book “The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery,” with the Up panel as they discuss the Obama administration's actions to save the US economy.</p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNEv44osMILi6jRJMBWeR7FhKrOtmA&amp;url=http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up-with-chris-hayes/46774756/">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramMSNBC.comSun, 18 Mar 2012 14:56:07 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65392 at http://newamerica.netHow Obama Could Have Better Fixed The Economy | U.S. News & World Reporthttp://newamerica.net/node/65360
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<span class="date-display-single">March 16, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p><b>Noam Scheiber</b>, a senior editor at The New Republic, examines the decisions made by Obama's economic advisers in the first 2½ years of his term in The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery. Scheiber recently spoke with US News about the <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNH11xSwAAYvsHMS9Bf0MSzPWZdBYw&amp;url=http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/03/16/how-obama-could-have-better-fixed-the-economy">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramU.S. News & World ReportFri, 16 Mar 2012 15:37:16 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65360 at http://newamerica.netThe Orszag Fiscal Crisis Plan | Daily Reckoninghttp://newamerica.net/node/65301
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<span class="date-display-single">March 14, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>“In May 2009,” writes journalist <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, “the president asked [White House budget director Peter Orszag] to draft a secret memo laying out the government's options in the event of a fiscal crisis, in which a runaway deficit sent interest rates <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNEvXA-2cZp0869AU0-B54noROTOLQ&amp;url=http://dailyreckoning.com/the-orszag-fiscal-crisis-plan/">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramWed, 14 Mar 2012 20:24:05 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65301 at http://newamerica.net'The Escape Artists,' By Noam Scheiber | New York Timeshttp://newamerica.net/node/65149
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<span class="date-display-single">March 9, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>In “The Escape Artists,” <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, a senior editor at The New Republic, covers many of the same meetings, egos and behind-the-scenes debates. In both books, the president comes across as cerebral, well intentioned and initially naïve — no match <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNF9ykkgAHyCq5UyTLWcrLmOrsC9Gg&amp;url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/books/review/the-escape-artists-by-noam-scheiber.html">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramThe New York TimesFri, 09 Mar 2012 17:00:14 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65149 at http://newamerica.netDemocrats And The Bush Tax Cuts | Truthouthttp://newamerica.net/node/65047
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<span class="date-display-single">March 6, 2012</span> </div>
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<br /><p>Mark Thoma provides an excerpt from <b>Noam Scheiber</b> on Peter Orszag's attempt to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. In short, Orszag wanted to extend the “middle-class” tax cuts for two years (letting the tax cuts for the rich expire); then he expected <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNGwNlV4fuWfpxpbNydk0vjKUGoivg&amp;url=http://www.truth-out.org/democrats-and-bush-tax-cuts/1331070635">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramTue, 06 Mar 2012 21:55:08 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>65047 at http://newamerica.netWhy Re-Electing Obama Could Be An Economic Disaster | Business Insiderhttp://newamerica.net/node/64949
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<span class="date-display-single">March 3, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>That's the conclusion of <b>Noam Scheiber</b>, who wrote yesterday in The Daily Beast that early in Obama's Presidency, he was intrigued by a proposal to let all the tax cuts expire, or only let the middle class tax cuts continue if they were "paid for" <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNG71kOAlihTJpFnB9EsFki_SZEUAw&amp;url=http://www.businessinsider.com/why-re-electing-obama-could-be-an-economic-disaster-2012-3">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramSat, 03 Mar 2012 12:31:03 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>64949 at http://newamerica.netNo Fighting In The Money Room | Slate Magazinehttp://newamerica.net/node/64947
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<span class="date-display-single">March 3, 2012</span> </div>
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<p>Still, with his new book, The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery, <b>Noam Scheiber</b> offers a persuasive take on administration policymaking, one in which there are no heroes and no villains, no fools, no saints, not even a clear road not <b>...</b></p><ul class="links inline"><li class="feedapi_feed first"><a href="/node/24210">Feed: In the News Items</a></li>
<li class="feedapi_original last"><a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&amp;fd=R&amp;usg=AFQjCNE6RIWF-AeVdQup_Bf21Znf8yRRQw&amp;url=http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/03/noam_scheiber_s_the_escape_artists_reviewed_.html">Original article</a></li>
</ul>New America Fellows ProgramSlateSat, 03 Mar 2012 05:20:28 +0000<a href="http://newamerica.net/user/320" title="View user profile.">Noam Scheiber</a>64947 at http://newamerica.net